A YEAR passed and half a year, and she had not found an answer to Tanqueray's question.
She had gone on somehow. He himself had made it easier for her by his frequent disappearances. He had found a place somewhere on Dartmoor where he hid himself from the destroyers, from the dreadful little people, where he hid himself from Rose. It helped her—not to have the question raised.
Now (they were in August of nineteen-ten) Tanqueray was back again with his question. He had left her, about eleven o'clock in the evening, in her study, facing it. Not but that he had provided her with a solution, a positive solution. "Jinny," he had said, "why don't you do as I do? Why don't you go away, if it was only for a few months every year?"
It seemed so simple, Tanqueray's solution, that at first she wondered why it had not occurred to her before. But as she looked back over the last three years she saw why. It could not have occurred to her as long as she had had the charge of her own children. She would not be entertaining it now if Gertrude were not there, looking after them. And it would not have been possible if the baby, the little girl, her third child, had lived. She had wanted to have a little girl, just to show what she could do. She had said, "There shall be one happy woman in the world and she shall be my daughter."
But the little girl had never lived at all. She had been brought forth dead in the night that followed Mabel Brodrick's death. Jane had been with Mabel when she died. That was in January six months ago.
After that there had come the great collapse, the six weeks when she lay quiet and Gertrude, like an angel, waited on her. She had been allowed to have the little boys with her for hours at a time then, she being utterly unable to excite them. Sometimes, when she was not well enough to have them very long, Gertrude would bring them in to look at her, the little solemn-eyed, quiet boys, holding Gertrude's hands. Every day brought her a moment of pain when she saw them going out of the room with Gertrude, led by her hand.
For six weeks Brodrick had been left very much to Gertrude. And Gertrude's face in that time had flowered softly, as if she had entered herself into the peace she made.
But in March Jane was on her feet again. In April Brodrick took her to the Riviera, and her return (in May) was the return of that brilliant and distracting alien who had invaded Brodrick's house seven years ago. Jane having nothing to do but to recover had done it so completely that Henry admitted that he would not have known her. To which she had rather ominously replied that she knew herself, only too well.
Even before she went away, even lying quiet, she had been aware that life was having its triumphant will of her. She had known all along, of course, that (as Owen Prothero had told her) she was sound through and through. Her vitality was unconquerable. Nothing could wreck her. Even Henry would own that her body, when they gave it a chance, was as fine a physical envelope as any woman could wish to have. Lying quiet, she had been inclined to agree with Henry that genius—her genius at any rate—was a neurosis; and she was not going to be neurotic any more. Whatever it was, it had made things terribly complicated. And to Jane lying quiet they had become absurdly simple. She herself was simplified. She had been torn in pieces; and in putting herself together again she had left out the dangerous, disintegrating, virile element. Whatever happened now, she would no longer suffer from the presence in her of two sexes contending for the mastery. Through it all, through all her dreadful virility, she had always been persistently and preposterously feminine. And lying quiet she was more than ever what George Tanqueray had said she was not to be—a mere woman.
Therefore to Jane, lying quiet, there had been no question of how she was to go on.
But to Jane on her feet again, in all her ungovernable, disastrous energy, the question was as insistent as Tanqueray himself. Her genius had recognized its own vehicle in her body restored to perfect health, and three years' repression had given it ten times its power to dominate and torture. It had thriven on the very tragedies that had brought her low.
It knew its hour and claimed her. She was close upon thirty-nine. It would probably claim her without remission for the next seven years. It had been relentless enough in its youth; it would be terrible in its maturity. The struggle, if she struggled, would tear her as she had never yet been torn. She would have to surrender, or at any rate to make terms with it. It was useless to fall back upon the old compromises and adjustments. Tanqueray's solution was the only possible, the only tolerable one. But it depended perilously upon Hugh's consent.
She went to him in his study where he sat peaceably smoking in the half-hour before bed-time.
Brodrick merely raised his eyebrows as she laid it before him—her monstrous proposal to go away—for three months. He asked her if three months was not rather a long time for a woman to leave her home and her children?
"I know," she said, "but if I don't——"
"Well?"
"I shall go to pieces."
He looked at her critically, incredulously.
"Why can't you say at once what's wrong?" he said. "Is there anything you want that you don't have here? Is there any mortal thing that can be done that isn't done?"
"Not any mortal thing."
"What is it then?"
"Hugh dear, did it never strike you that you are a very large family? And that when it comes down on me it's in the proportion of about seven to one?"
"Whoeverdoescome down on you?"
"John," said she, "was with me for two hours yesterday."
Brodrick lent his ear as to a very genuine grievance. John, since his bereavement, was hardly ever out of the house.
"And I suppose," he said, "he bored you?"
"No, but he will call when I'm writing."
"Why on earth don't you send him away?"
"I would, if Mabel hadn't died. But how can you when he's unhappy? It would hurt him so. And yet, supposing you were to die, what would John say if I were to call on him at the works every day, and play with his dynamos to distract my mind, or sit with him in his office rumpling his hair, and dislocating his ideas till he didn't know the difference between a steam-roller and an internal combustion engine? That's more or less what John does to me. The only thing is to get away."
However, it was for Brodrick to decide, she said. And Brodrick said he couldn't decide until he had thought it over.
She was very soon aware that she had caused a scandal in her husband's family by her proposal to go away for three months. The scandal was not altogether unconnected with George Tanqueray, since it was at his suggestion that she proposed to take this unprecedented step. If she had proposed to take it with him they could hardly have shown themselves more horrified.
She knew how monstrous her conduct must appear to them. She could see it all so clearly from their point of view. That had always been after all her poor merit, that she could see things from other people's point of view. Her vision indeed of them, of the way they took things, was apt to be so vivid, so engrossing that it left her with no point of view of her own. She carried into life itself and all its relations her virtue as an artist, that effacement of her observing self in favour of the thing observed.
That, Nina told her, was her danger. Nina happened to be with her on the day when another family committee met and sat upon her case. They were sitting on it now, up-stairs with Brodrick in his study. She knew infallibly what their judgment would be. Just as she had seemed to them so long a creature of uncertain health, she must seem now inconstant, insincere, the incarnation of heartlessness, egotism and caprice. She said to herself that it was all very well for Nina to talk. This insight was a curse. It was terrible to know what people were thinking, to feel what they were feeling. And they were seven to one, so that when she gave them pain she had to feel seven times the pain she gave.
But after all they, her judges, could take care of themselves. This family, that was one consolidated affection, was like a wall, it would shelter and protect her so long as she was content to be sheltered and protected; if she dashed herself against it it would break her in pieces.
And Nina was saying, "Can't you take it into your own hands? Why should you let these people decide your fate for you?"
"Hugh will decide it," she said. "He's with them up-stairs now."
"Is he asking their advice?"
"No, they're giving it him. That's my chance, Nina."
"Your chance?"
"My one chance. They'll put his back up and, if it's only to show them, he'll let me go."
"Do you mean to say, Jinny, that if he didn't you wouldn't go?"
"I don't even know that I'd go if he minded very much."
"I wish to goodness George Tanqueray was here. He might make you——"
"What has he ever made me do?"
"He might make you see it."
"I do see it," said Jane.
She closed her eyes as one tired with much seeing. Nina's presence hardly helped her. Nina was even more profoundly disturbing than George Tanqueray; she had even less of consolation to offer to one torn and divided, she herself being so supreme an instance of the glory of the single flame.
The beauty and the wonder of it—in Nina—was its purity. Nina showed to what a pitch it had brought her, the high, undivided passion of her genius. Under it every trace of Nina's murkiness had vanished. She had lost that look of restless, haggard adolescence, that horrible intentness, as if her hand was always on the throat of her wild beast. You saw, of course, that she had suffered; but you saw too that her genius was appeased by her suffering. It was just, it was compassionate; it had rewarded her for every pang.
Jane found herself saying beautiful things about Nina's genius. It was the flame, unmistakably the pure flame. If solitude, if virginity, if frustration could do that——She knew what it had cost Nina, but it was worth it, seeing what she had gained.
Nina faced her with the eyes that had grown so curiously quiet.
"Ah, Jinny," she said, "couldyouhave borne to pay my price?"
She owned that she could not.
Up-stairs Brodrick faced his family where it sat in judgment upon Jane.
"What does she complain of?" said John.
"Interruption," said Hugh. "She says she never has any time to herself, with people constantly running in and out."
"She doesn't mind," said Sophy, "how much time she gives to the Protheros and the rest of them. Nina Lempriere's with her now. She's been here three solid hours. As for George Tanqueray——"
John shook his head.
"That's what I don't like, Hugh, Tanqueray's hanging about the house at all hours of the day and night. However you look at it, it's a most undesirable thing."
"Oh—Tanqueray," said Brodrick, "he's all right."
"He's anything but all right," said Henry. "A fellow who notoriously neglects his wife."
"Well," said Brodrick, "I don't neglect mine."
"If you give her her head," said Henry.
He scowled at Henry.
"You know, Hugh," said Frances, "she really will be talked about."
"She's being talked about now," said Brodrick, "and I don't like it."
"There's no use talking," said John sorrowfully, and he rose to go.
They all rose then. Two by two they went across the Heath to John's house, Sophy with Henry and Frances with John; and as they went they leaned to each other, talking continuously about Hugh, and Tanqueray, and Jane.
"If Hugh gives in to her in this," said Henry, "he'll always have to give in."
"I could understand it," said Sophy, "if she had too much to do in the house."
"It's not," said Frances, "as if there was any struggle to make ends meet. She has everything she wants."
"Children——" said John.
"It's preposterous," said Henry.
When Nina had gone Brodrick came to Jane.
"Well," he said, "do you still want to go away for three months?"
"It's not that I want to, but I must."
"If you must," he said, "of course you may. I dare say it will be a very good thing for you."
"Shall you mind, Hugh?"
"Oh dear me, no. I shall be very comfortable here with Gertrude."
"And Gertrude," she murmured, "will be very comfortable here with you."
That evening, about nine o'clock, the parlour-maid announced to Brodrick in his study that Miss Winny and Mr. Eddy had called. They were in the dining-room. When Brodrick asked if Mrs. Brodrick was with them he was told that the young gentlemen had said expressly that it was Mr. Brodrick whom they wished to see.
Brodrick desired that they should be brought to him. They were going away, to stay somewhere with a school-fellow of Winny's, and he supposed that they had looked in to say good-bye.
As they entered something told him, as he had not been told before, that his young niece and nephew had grown up. It was not Winny's ripening form and trailing gown, it was not the golden down on Eddy's upper lip; it was not altogether that the outline of their faces had lost the engaging and tender indecision of its youth. It was their unmistakable air of inward assurance and maturity.
After the usual greetings (Brodrick was aware of a growing restraint in this particular) Eddy, at the first opening, made for his point—theirpoint, rather. His uncle had inquired with urbane irony at what hour the family was to be bereaved of their society, and how long it would have to languish——
They were going, Eddy said, at ten in the morning, and a jolly good thing too. They weren't coming back, either, any sooner than they could help. They—well, they couldn't "stick it" at home just now.
They'd had (Winny interpolated) a row with Uncle Henry, a gorgeous row (the colour of it was in Winny's face).
Brodrick showed no sign of surprise, not so much as a raised eyebrow. He asked in quiet tones what it was all about?
Eddy, standing up before his uncle and looking very tall and manly, gazed down his waistcoat at his boots.
"It was about Jin-Jin," Winny said.
(Eddy could almost have sworn that his uncle suffered a slight shock.)
"We can't stick it, you know, the way they're going on about her. The fact is," said the tall youth, "we told Uncle Henry that, and he didn't like it."
"You did, did you?"
"Yes. I know you'll say it isn't our business, but you see——"
"You see" (Winny explained), "we're so awfully fond of her."
Brodrick knew that he ought to tell the young rascals that their being fond of her didn't make it any more their business. But he couldn't.
"What did you say to your Uncle Henry?"
He really wanted to know.
"Oh, we said it was all humbug about Jinny being neurotic. He's neurotic himself and so he thinks everybody else is. He's got it regularly on the brain."
(If, Brodrick thought, Henry could have heard him!)
"You can't think," said Winny, "how he bores us with it."
"I said he couldn't wonder if shewasneurotic, when you think what she's got to stand. The boresomeness——" He left the idea to its own immensity.
"Of what?" said Brodrick.
"Well, for one thing, you know, of living everlastingly with Gertrude."
Brodrick said, "Gertrude doesn't bore anybody."
"She doesn't boreyou, Uncle Hugh, of course, because you're a man."
(Winny said that.)
"Then," said Eddy, "there'sus. You know, we're an awful family for a woman like Jinny to have married into. There isn't one of us fit to black her boots. And I believe Uncle Henry thinks she wasn't made for anything except to bring more of us into the world."
Brodrick's face displayed a fine flush.
"You're all right, Uncle Hugh."
Brodrick lowered his eyelids in modest acceptance of this tribute.
"I keep forgetting you're one of them, because you married her."
"What else did you say to him?"
Eddy became excited. "Oh—I got in one before we left—I landed him neatly. I asked him why on earth—if he thought she was neurotic—he let her shut herself up for a whole year with that screaming kid, when any fat nurse would have done the job as well? And why he let her break her neck, running round after Aunt Mabel? I had him there."
"What did your Uncle say to that?" (Brodrick's voice was rather faint.)
"He didn't say anything. He couldn't—oh—well, hedidsay my impertinence was unendurable. And I saidhiswas, when you think what Jinny is."
He meditated on it. He had become, suddenly, a grave and reverent youth.
"We really came," Winny said, "to know whether Jinnyisgoing away?"
"She is going away," said Brodrick, "for three months."
He rose and held out the hand of parting. To his surprise Winny kissed him and kept her face against his as she whispered, "Andif—she has to stay a year?"
"She shall stay," Brodrick said.
She went down to Devonshire, to a farmhouse not far from Chagford, on the edge of Dartmoor. Tanqueray had rooms there which were his and nobody else's, and he had lent them to her for three months, or for as long as she cared to stay. She would be safe there, he said. Nobody would find her.
Certainly it would be hard to find her, so remote and hidden was the place. The farm, which was small and humble, stood in a deep lane cut off from Chagford by a hill. The lane dipped abruptly from the hillside; it plunged; it went down, at noon, as into a pit of darkness. The white-washed house, lodged on a flat break in the descent, sucked light through its high ring of ash-trees. Below it the lane went headlong to the hill-bottom. It was perched on a hill, hugged in a valley, according as you approached it from the north-east or the south-west.
The doorway was guarded by a deep, white-walled porch. You came straight into an ancient low-roofed, white-washed kitchen, now the living-room for the eccentric stranger who had made his lodging there. A stairway led up from it into the bedroom overhead. This living-room had a door that opened into a passage joining it to further and dimmer parts of the house; but the bedroom was inaccessible save by its own stair.
By the deep-set window of each room there stood a firm, solid oak table, at which, the woman of the farm had told her, Mr. Tanqueray wrote. Both windows looked on to the lane. That was the beauty of it, Tanqueray had said. There would be nothing to distract her. You couldn't trust Jinny on the open moor.
For the first week Jinny, cut off from her husband and children, was assailed by a poignant and perpetual misery. As one who has undergone a surgical operation, she suffered an inveterate nerve-aching after the severed flesh. She was haunted by Brodrick's face as she had seen it from her corner of the rail-way carriage, looking in at her through the window, silent and overcast, and by his look, his unforgettable look as the train carried her away. And the children, their faces and their soft forms and their voices haunted her. She did no work that week.
Then the country claimed her. Dartmoor laid on her its magic of wild earth and wild skies. She tried to write and could not. Something older and more powerful than her genius had her. She suffered a resurgence of her youth, her young youth that sprang from the moors, and had had its joy in them and knew its joy again. It was on the moors that earth had most kinship and communion with the sky. It took the storms of heaven. Its hills were fused with heaven in fires of sunset; they wore the likeness of the clouds, of vapour and fine air. On the moors it was an endless passing of substance into shadow and of shadow into substance.
And she had her own kinship and communion with them. She remembered these hillsides grey as time, where the grass was a perishing bloom on the face of the immemorial granite. A million memories and instincts met in these smells of furze and heather and moss, of green rushes and the sweet earth of the south-west.
Tanqueray was right. She was not to be trusted on the open moors. She was out of doors all day. And out of doors the Idea that had driven her forth withdrew itself. Its very skirts, only half-discerned, were beyond her grasp. She was oppressed at times by a sense of utter frustration and futility. If this was all; if she was simply there enjoying herself, tramping the hills all day, a glorious animal set free; if she was not going to accomplish anything, then she had no business to be there at all. It would be better to give it up, to give in, to go back again.
There was a day in her third week when she nearly did go back, when it seemed to her that she would be obeying a wise instinct if she went. She got as far as looking up the trains to Waterloo.
Then, on the brink of it, something that announced itself as a wiser and profounder instinct, an instinct of self-preservation, told her not to go. It told her to wait, to trust to Nature's way, and to Nature's wisdom in bringing back her youth. Nature's way was to weave over again the web of life so strained and worn, so tangled and broken by the impact of other lives. Nature's wisdom was to make her simple and strong, a new creature, with a clean vision and an imagination once more virgin to the world. In short, Nature's beneficent intention was to restore her whole to the genius which also had been a part of Nature's plan.
And all the time good news of Brodrick and the children reached her every other day. Punctually, every other day Gertrude Collett wrote, assuring her that all was going well at home and urging her to stay. Brodrick wrote (at rather longer intervals) saying how happy the children were, and how entirely comfortable he was with Gertrude. His letters contained little besides praise of Gertrude. There was no reason, he reiterated, why she should not stay.
She stayed, and in her fifth week she received the reward of her staying. Walking back to the farm late one evening, the moors veiled from her passion by the half-darkness, her Idea came back to her. It came, not yet with the vividness of flesh and blood, but like a ghost. It had ghostly hands and feet, and like a ghost it walked the road with her. But through its presence she felt in herself again that nascent ecstasy which foretold, infallibly, the onset of the incredible act and labour of creation.
When she reached the farm she found George Tanqueray sitting in the porch. The lamp-light through the open door revealed him.
"Whatever brought you here?" she said.
"What always brings me."
She understood him to mean that he also had been driven forth, and was in subjection to the Idea.
"Have you come to turn me out?" she said.
"No, Jinny."
He explained that he was staying in the village, at the Three Crowns. He had arrived that evening and had walked over.
He followed her into the deep kitchen. At the supper-table his place had been laid for him already. He had ordered it so.
He looked at her, smiling an apology.
"Is it all right?" he said.
"Perfectly all right, George."
They talked all evening and far into the night. She parted from him at the gate of the lane under the ash-trees. Under the ash-trees her Idea showed in its immense and luminous perfection. It trembled into life. It drew her, palpitating, into the lamp-light of the room.
She had found what she had come for.
That was the effect he always had on her.
Brodrick had been alone in the first fortnight that followed Jane's extraordinary departure. Instead of settling down to be comfortable with Gertrude, he had packed her off to the seaside with the children and their nurse. He had often wondered what he should do without Gertrude. Now he knew. He knew by incontrovertible experiment that he could not do without her at all. Everything, even the silver-chiming clock, went wrong in her absence.
If, before that fortnight, Brodrick had been asked suddenly with what feelings he regarded Gertrude Collett, he would have replied that he was unaware of regarding the lady with any feelings, or indeed of regarding her intimately at all. And he would have told the simple truth; for Brodrick was of all men the most profoundly unaware.
Of course, there was gratitude. He had always been aware of that. But in that fortnight his gratitude took on immense proportions, it became a monstrous and indestructible indebtedness. He would have said that such a feeling, so far from making him comfortable with Gertrude, would have made him very uncomfortable, much more uncomfortable than he cared to be. But curiously it was not so. In his renewed intercourse with Gertrude he found a vague, exquisite satisfaction. The idea of not paying Gertrude back in any way would have been intolerable; but what he felt now was so very like affection that it counted as in some measure a return. It was as if he had settled it in his own mind that he could now meet the innocent demands which the angelic woman seemed to make. Goodness knew it wasn't much to ask, a little attention, a little display of the feeling so very like affection, after all that she had done.
It pleased him now when he came, mooning drearily, into the drawing-room, to find Gertrude in possession. He was almost always tired now, and he was glad to lie back in an easy-chair and have his tea handed to him by Gertrude. He looked forward, in fancy, to the children's hour that followed tea-time, and he had made a great point at first of having them to himself. But as a matter of fact, being almost always tired, he enjoyed their society far more sincerely when Gertrude was there to keep them in order.
That was her gift. She had been the genius of order ever since she had come into his house—good gracious, was it ten years ago? Her gift made her the most admirable secretary an editor could have. But she was more than that now. She was a perfect companion to a physically fatigued and intellectually slightly deteriorated man. He owned to the deterioration. Jane had once told him that his intellect was a "lazy, powerful beast." It seemed to him now, humbly regarding it, that the beast was and always had been much more lazy than powerful. It required constant stimulus to keep it going. His young ambition and his young passion for Jane Holland had converged to whip it up. It flagged with the dying down of passion and ambition. Things latterly had come a bit too late. His dream had been realized too late. And he hadn't realized it, either. Jane had realized it for him. No sooner had he got his wonderful magazine into his own hands than he found out how little he cared about it. He had become more and more absorbed in its external and financial aspects. He showed more and more as the man of business, the slightly hustled and harassed father of a family. He had put off intellectual things. His deterioration weighed on him when he thought of Jane. But Gertrude's gentleness stood between him and any acute perception of his state.
Sometimes when they sat together over her fire, lit in the September evenings, there would be long silences. Gertrude never broke a silence. She was conscious of it; she, as it were, held it—he could almost feel her holding it—tenderly, as if she loved it; she handled it gently as if she were afraid that it would break. She gave him so much sense of her presence and no more. She kept before him, humbly, veiled from his vision, the fact that she was there to serve him.
Sometimes a curious shyness would come on her. It was not the poignant shyness of her youth which Brodrick had once found so distressing. It conveyed no fear and no embarrassment, only (so he made it out) the quietest, subtlest hint of possible flight. Its physical sign was the pale, suffused flame in Gertrude's face, and that web of air across her eyes. There was a sort of charm about it.
Sometimes, coming upon Gertrude alone and unaware of him, he would find her sad. He said to himself then that she had no great cause for gaiety. It was a pretty heavy burden for her, this shouldering of another woman's responsibilities. He thought that Jane had sometimes been a little hard on her. He supposed that was her (Jane's) feminine way. The question was whether he himself might not have been kinder; whether there wasn't anything that he might yet do to make life sweeter to her. He was, in fact, profoundly sorry for Gertrude, more profoundly sorry than he had been ten years ago, when she had come to him, and he had kept her, though he didn't want her, because he was sorry for her. Well, he wanted her enough now in all conscience.
Then the horrible thought would occur to him: supposing Gertrude were to go? It was not conceivable, her going.
For, above all her gifts, Gertrude was an incomparable mother to those unfortunate children (since Jane's departure Brodrick had begun to think definitely of his children as unfortunate). It was distinctly pleasurable the feeling with which he watched her ways in gathering them to her side and leading them softly from the room when "Daddy was busy," or when "poor Daddy was so tired." More than once he found himself looking out of his study window at her quiet play with the little boys in the garden. Solemn little boys they were; and sometimes he wondered whether little Jacky were nottoosolemn, too preternaturally quiet for four and a half, and rather too fond of holding Gertrude's hand. He remembered how the little beggar used to romp and laugh when Jinny——And remembering he would turn abruptly from the window with a sore heart and a set face.
Three weeks passed thus. There was a perceptible increase in Gertrude's shyness and sadness.
One evening after dinner she came to him in his study. He rose and drew forward a chair for her. She glanced at his writing-table and at the long proof-sheets that hung from it, streaming.
"I mustn't," she said. "You're busy."
"Well—not so busy as all that. What is it?"
"I've been thinking that it would perhaps be better if I were to leave."
"To leave? What's put that into your head?"
She did not answer. She appeared to him dumb with distress.
"Have the children been too much for you?"
"Poor little darlings—no."
"Little monkeys. Send them to me if you can't manage them."
"It isn't that. It is—I don't think it's right for me to stay."
"Notright?"
"On the children's account, I mean."
He looked at her and a shade, a tremor, of uneasiness passed over his face.
"I say," he said, "you don't think they're unhappy?"
(She smiled).
"—Without their mother?" He jerked it out with a visible effort.
"No. If they were I shouldn't be so uneasy."
"Come, you don't want them to be unhappy, do you?"
"No. I don't want anybody to be unhappy. That's why I think I'd better go."
"On their account?" he repeated, hopelessly adrift.
"Theirs, and their mother's."
"But it's on their account—and—their mother's—that we want you."
"I know; but it isn't fair to them or to—Mrs. Brodrick that they should be so dependent on me."
"But—they're babies."
"Not quite—now. It isn't right that I should be taking their mother's place, that they should look to me for everything."
"But," he broke in irritably, "they don't. Why should they?"
"They do. They must. You see, it's because I'm on the spot."
"I see." He hid his frowning forehead with one hand.
"I know," she continued, "it can't be helped. It isn't anybody's fault. It's—it's inevitable."
"Yes. For the present it's—inevitable."
They both paused on that word.
"I suppose," he said, "you're really afraid that they'll get too fond of you?"
"Yes."
"They're very fond of their mother, aren't they?"
"Yes—if she were always here."
"Of course, it does make your position a little difficult. Still, we don't want them to fret for her—we don't want them not to be fond of you. Besides, if you went, what on earth would they do without you?"
"They must learn to do without me. They would have some one else."
"Yes, and they'll be fond ofher."
"Not in the same way. I think perhaps I've given myself too much to them. There's something unusual, something tragic in the way they cling to me. I know it's bad for them. I try to check it, and I can't. And I've no right to let it go on. Nobody has a right except their mother."
"Well, it's awfully nice of you to feel like that about it. But as you say, I don't see how it's to be helped. I think you're taking an exaggerated view—conscientiously exaggerated. They're too young, you know, to be very tragic."
She smiled as through tears.
"I don't think you'll save tragedy by going. Besides, what should I do?"
"You?"
"Yes. You don't appear to have thought of me."
"Don't I?" She smiled again, as if at some secret, none too happy, of her own.
"If I had not thought of you I should never have come here a second time. If I had not thought of you I should not have thought of going."
"Did you think I wanted you to go?"
"I—was not quite sure."
He laughed. "Are you sure now?"
She looked at him again.
"Idohelp you by staying?"
He was overwhelmed by his indebtedness.
"Most certainly you do. I must have been very ungracious if you haven't realized how indispensable you are."
"If you're sure of that—I'll stay."
"Good."
He held out his hand and detained hers for a moment. "Are you sure you don't want to leave us? I'm not asking too much of you?"
She withdrew her hand.
"You have never asked too much."
Thus Gertrude uncovered the knees of the gods.
Four days in every week Jane had a letter from Gertrude and once a week a letter from Brodrick. She was thus continually assured that all was well and that Brodrick was very comfortable with Gertrude.
She was justified in staying on, since her genius had come back to her, divinely placable, divinely propitiated and appeased.
She knew that in a measure she owed this supreme reconciliation to George Tanqueray. Her genius was virile. He could not give it anything, nor could it have taken anything he gave. He was passive to her vision and humble, on his knees, as he always had been, before a kindred immortality. What he did for her was to see her idea as she saw it, but so that through his eyes she saw steadily and continuously its power and perfection. She was aware that in the last five years she had grown dependent on him for that. For five years he had lifted her out of the abyss when she had found herself falling. Through all the surgings and tossings that had beset her he had kept her from sinking into the trough of the wave. Never once had he let go his hold till he had seen her riding gaily on the luminous crest.
His presence filled her with a deep and strong excitement. For two years, in their long separations, she had found that her craving for it was at times unbearable. She knew that when her flame died down and she was in terror of extinction, she had only to send for him to have her fear taken from her. She had only to pick up a book of his, to read a sentence of his, and she would feel herself afire again. Everything about him, his voice, his look, the touch of his hand, had this penetrating, life-giving quality.
Three weeks passed and Tanqueray was still staying in his inn at Chagford. In the mornings they worked, he on his book and she on hers. She saw him every afternoon or evening. Sometimes they took long walks together over the moors. Sometimes they wandered in the deep lanes. Sometimes, in rainy weather, they sat indoors, talking. In the last five years Tanqueray (who never used to show his work) had brought all his manuscripts for her to read. He brought them now. Sometimes she read to him what she had written. Sometimes he read to her. Sometimes he left his manuscript with her and took hers away with him. They discussed every doubtful point together, they advised each other and consulted. Sometimes they talked of other things. She was aware that the flame he kindled leaned to him, drawn by his flame. She kept it high. She wanted him to see how divine it was, and how between him and her there could be no question of passion that was not incorruptible, a fiery intellectual thing.
But every day Tanqueray walked up from the village to the farm. She looked on his coming as the settled, natural thing. Brodrick continued to assure her that the children were happy without her, and that he was very comfortable with Gertrude; and Tanqueray reiterated that it was all right, all perfectly right.
One day he arrived earlier than usual, about eleven o'clock. He proposed that they should walk together over the moor to Post Bridge, lunch at the inn there and walk back. Distance was nothing to them.
They set out down the lane. There had been wind at dawn. Southwards, over the hills, the clouds were piled up to the high sun in a riot and glory of light and storm. The hills were dusk under their shadow.
The two swung up the long slopes at a steady pace, rejoicing in the strong movement of their limbs. It was thus that they used to set out together long ago, on their "days," over the hills of Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. Jane remarked that her state now was almost equal to that great freedom. And they talked of Brodrick.
"There aren't many husbands," she said, "who would let their wives go off like this for months at a time."
"Not many. He has his merits."
"When you think of the life I lead him at home it takes heaps off his merit. The kindest thing I can do to him is to go away and stay away. George, you don't know how I've tormented the poor darling."
"I can imagine."
"He was an angel to bear it."
She became pensive at the recollection.
"Sometimes I wonder whether I ought, really, to have married. You told me that I oughtn't."
"When?"
"Six years ago."
"Well—I'm inclined to say so still. Only, the unpardonable sin in a great artist—isn't so much marrying as marrying the wrong person."
"He isn't the wrong person for me. But I'm afraid I'm the wrong person for him."
"It comes to the same thing."
"Not altogether." She pondered. "No doubt God had some wise purpose when he made Hugh marry me. I can see the wise purpose in Owen's marrying Laura, and the wise purpose in his not marrying Nina; but when it comes to poor, innocent Hugh tying himself up for ever and ever with a woman like me——"
"Don't put it on God. His purpose was wise enough."
"What was it?"
"Why—obviously—that I should have married you, that Hugh should have married Gertrude, and that some reputable young draper should have married Rose."
"Poor little Rose!"
"Poor little Rose would have been happy with her draper; Gertrude would have been happy with Brodrick; you—no, I, would have been divinely happy with you."
She laughed. "Oh, would you!"
"Thatwas the heaven-appointed scheme. And there we were, all five of us, bent on frustrating the divine will—I beg Gertrude's pardon—Gertrude's will was entirely in accord."
"It sounds delightfully simple, but I doubt if it would have worked out so. We've all got as much of each other as we want."
"That's what we haven't got. Very large, important pieces of each of us have been taken and given to the wrong person. Look at you—look at me."
She looked at him. "My dear, the largest and most important part of you is kept well out of the reach of Rose's little fingers. You and I have quite as much of each other as is good for us. Ifwewere to tear each other to pieces there'd be nothing left of us."
Thus lightly they handled it, setting out in the morning.
Their pace slackened. They had begun to think.
She had always been a little hard on him about Rose, Tanqueray thought. It was as if she accused him, or rather his genius, of a monstrous egoism. Surely that only meant that it was indomitably sound and sane. A reckless sanity it had, a soundness capable of any risks. There never was any man who so defied the forces of dissolution, who had so profound an instinct of self-preservation.
Such a nature was bound to be inhospitable to parasites. By the very ease with which it assimilated all food of earth and heaven, it starved them at the roots.
It was not that he deliberately cast off any tender thing that clung to him. It was that the sheer impulse of growth in him was so tremendous that it burst through and out-soared the embracing and aspiring bonds. His cruelty (for itwascruelty from the poor parasite's point of view) was like Nature's, unconscious and impersonal.
It was not his fault, therefore, if Rose's arms, try as she would, could never hold him. It was not that he was indifferent to Rose or to her suffering, or that he shrank in moral cowardice from dealing with it as a man should deal. It was that the voice of implacably wise, and indubitably sane instincts warned him that he would accomplish no great thing if he turned to contemplate her tragedy, still less if he accepted it as his own. Incorruptible impulses urged him to evasion. And it was thus that in the seven years of his marriage he had achieved almost complete oblivion of her.
But Jane—Jane was a creature of like impulses and of the same stature as he. Her dependence on him, if she was dependent, was for such things as overflowed from him, that cost him no effort to bestow. And she gave as superbly as she received. There was nothing in the least parasitic about Jane. She had the freedom of all the spaces of earth and heaven. She could tramp the hills beside him with the same breath and stride.
He had given her his hand for the last steep ascent. She sprang to it and took it in her fine, firm grasp; but he felt no great pull upon his arm. She kept step with him and reached the top unflushed, unpanting.
Watching her, he saw how marriage had ripened her slender body and given to it the beauty that it had lacked. She was more feminine than ever. She had added that invincible quality to the sexless charm that had drawn him hitherto, drawn him irresistibly, but on paths remote from disaster.
(He had forgotten that he had been aware that she was formidable ever since he had first realized that she belonged to another man.)
They lunched at Post Bridge, at the little inn that Tanqueray knew. They drove (a sudden inspiration seizing them) to Merivale and back. They stopped at their inn again for tea, and faced untired the long tramp of the return. It was evening when they reached the last moor that lay between them and the farm lane.
The long uphill road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to darkness, the furze threw out its unquenchable gold.
Jane was afraid of her thoughts and Tanqueray's. She talked incessantly. She looked around her and made him see how patches of furze seen under a haze showed flattened, with dark bitten edges, clinging close like lichen on a granite wall; and how, down the hillsides, in the beds of perished streams, the green grass ran like water.
"I love your voice," he said, "but I wish you'd look at me when you're talking."
"If I did," she said, "I couldn't talk."
The truth leaped out of her, and she drew in her breath, as if thus she could recall it; seeing all that it meant, and knowing that he who saw everything must see.
A silence fell on them. It lasted till they topped the rise.
Then Tanqueray spoke.
"Yes. A precious hash we've all made of it. You and I and Brodrick and poor Nina. Could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?"
"Not all of us. Not Owen. He didn't go far wrong when he married Laura."
"Because the beast's clairvoyant. And love only made him more so; while it makes us poor devils blind as bats."
"There's a dear little bat just gone by us. He's so happy."
"Ah—you should see him trying to fly by daylight."
Silence and the lucid twilight held them close.
"Jinny—do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from Wendover?"
She did not answer him.
"Jinny—we're there again and where we were then. We've slipped everything between. Positively, I can't remember now what came between."
It was her state, also. She could have owned it. Only that to her it was strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time and circumstance, all that had come between. It was part of their vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made.
"We must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said.
"Don't let's talk about it any more."
"It's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. That turns it to poison."
"Yes."
"And haven't we always told the truth to each other?"
"Not in the beginning. If we only had——"
"We didn't know it then."
"Iknew it," she said.
"Why didn't you tell me, then?"
"You know what you'd have thought of me if I had."
"You shouldn't have cared what I thought. You should have risked it."
"Risked it?"
"Risked it."
"But I risked losing you altogether. What didyourisk?"
He was silent.
"Why do you blame me? It was your fault, your choice."
"Was it really mine? Was it I who went wrong?"
"Yes," she said. "In the beginning. You knew I cared for you."
"If you'd let me see it."
"Oh, you saw it. I didn't tell you in as many words. But I let you see it.Thatwas where I went wrong."
"Yes, yes." He assented, for it was truth's hour. "You should have made mefeelit."
"How could I?"
"That was it. You couldn't."
"I couldn't when I knew you'd seen it."
"How did you know?"
"Oh—youtook good care of that."
"Was I a brute? Was I a brute to you, Jinny?"
She smiled.
"Not as men go. You couldn't help it. There was no deceiving me."
"Why, after all, shouldn't you have told me?"
"Why indeed?"
"It's a preposterous convention that leaves all the truth-telling to the unhappy man."
"Still—there it is. We can't get over it."
"Youcould have got over it. It wasn't made for you."
"It was made for all women. And for one who has been wrecked by it there are millions who have been saved. It was made for me more than any of them."
"If you prefer other women's conventions to your own happiness."
"Would it have been happiness to have given my heart and my soul to somebody who had no use for them and showed it?"
"You insist that I showed it?"
"You showed me plainly that it wasn't my heart and my soul you wanted."
"There you're wrong. There was a moment—if you'd only known it."
"I did know."
"What did you know?"
"I knew there was some power I had, if I had known how to use it."
"And didn't you?"
"I don't know. You see, I didn't try."
"You know how to use it now, I can tell you, with a vengeance."
"No. It isn't the same power, I think."
"At any rate you knew that it was touch and go with me? That ifyou'd chosen you might have done anything with me?"
"I knew that any other woman could have done the same."
"Then why not you?"
"I? I didn't want to hold you that way. I had some decency. I loved my poor friend too much to take him at a disadvantage."
"Good God! Sothatwas your view of it? I was sacrificed to your invincible ignorance."
"Oh no, to my knowledge. Or shall we say to an honourable scruple?"
"Honourable?"
"Yes. The whole honour of women lies in that."
"I hope you see where the whole honour of women has landed us at last."
They had reached the lane leading to their farm. Its depth held them closer than the twilight held. The trees guarded them. Every green branch roofed a hollow deep with haze.
"If you were a cold woman I could understand it."
"Icouldn't. It's because I was anything but cold."
"I know. You were afraid then."
"Yes. I was mortally afraid."
Above the lane, on the slope of the foot hills, they could see their farm, a dim grey roof in a ring of ash-trees. A dim green field opened out below it, fan-wise with a wild edge that touched the moor. It seemed to her with her altered memory that it was home they were drawing near.
"George," she said, "you know women as God knows them; why didn't you know me? Can't you see what I was afraid of? What we're all afraid of? What we're eternally trying to escape from? The thing that hunts us down, that turns again and rends us."
"You thought you saw that in me?"
"I don't see it now."
"Not now," he whispered.
They had come to the porch of the farmhouse. The door stood open. The lamp-light drew them in. He closed the door behind them. She stood facing him as one who waits.
"Not now," he said aloud.
He glanced round. The house and all about it was still.
"If we could always be here, Jinny——"
She turned from him, afraid.
"Why not?" he said, and followed her and took her in his arms.
He pressed back her head with one hand. His face sought hers, the face she knew, with its look of impetuous flight, of curves blown back, the face that seemed to lean forward, breasting the wind of its own speed. It leaned now, swift to its desire. It covered her face. Its lips were pressed to her lips, lips that drank her breath, that were fierce in their drinking, after their long thirst. She pushed it from her with her two hands and cried out, "Rose, little Rose!"
She struggled from his arms and ran from him, stumbling up the steep stairs. A door opened and shut. He heard her feet go slowly on the floor of her room above him. They reached the bed. She seemed to sink there.
That night she knew that she must leave Dartmoor, and go somewhere where George Tanqueray could not follow her and find her. She was mortally afraid of him. He had tracked and hunted her down swiftly and more inevitably than any destroyer or pursuer.
In spite of him, indeed because of him, her passion for this solitude of the moors was strong upon her, and she planned to move on the next day into Somerset, to a place on Exmoor that she knew. She would leave very early in the morning before Tanqueray could come to her.
She lay all night staring with hot eyes at the white walls that held her. At daylight she dropped asleep and slept on into the morning. When she woke she faced her purpose wide-eyed and unflinching. Her fear was there also and she faced it.
She was down too late for any train that could take her away before noon, and Tanqueray might come now at any time.
She was so late that the day's letters waited for her on the window-sill. In her agitation she nearly missed seeing them. One was from Gertrude, fulfilling punctually her pledge, assuring her as usual that all was well. The other was from her brother-in-law, Henry. It was very brief. Henry, after expressing the hope that she continued to benefit by the air of Dartmoor, supposed that she would have heard that Hugh was suffering from a chill he had caught by motoring without an overcoat.
She had not heard it. She read Gertrude's letter again to make sure. Among all the things, the absolutely unnecessary things, that Gertrude had mentioned, she had not mentioned that. She had broken her pledge.
They kept things from her, then. Heaven only knew what they had kept.
She read Henry's letter again. There were no details, but her mind supplied them as it grasped the sense of what hehadwritten. There rose before her instantly a vision of Hugh lying in his bed ill. He had a racing pulse, a flaming temperature. He was in for gastritis, at the least, if it was not pneumonia. She saw with intolerable vividness a long procession of terrors and disasters, from their cause, the chill, down to their remotest consequences. Her imagination never missed one.
And instantly there went from her the passion of her solitude, and the splendour of the moors perished around her like an imperfect dream, and her genius that had driven her there and held her let go its hold. It was as if it owned that it was beaten. She had no more fear of it. And she had no more fear of George Tanqueray.
Nothing existed for her but the fear that hung round Brodrick in his bed. This vision of calamity was unspeakable, it was worse than all the calamities that had actually been. It was worse through its significance and premonition than the illness of her little son; it was worse than the loss of her little dead-born daughter; it brought back to her with a more unendurable pang that everlasting warning utterance of Nina's, "With you—there'll be no end to your paying." Her heart cried out to powers discerned as implacable, "Anything but that! Anything but that!"
She had missed the first possible train to Waterloo, but there was another from a station five miles distant which would bring her home early in the evening. She packed hurriedly and sent one of the farm people to the village for a fly. Then she paced the room, maddening over the hours that she had still to spare.
Once or twice it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, Hugh was not so very ill. If he had been Henry would have told her. He would have suggested the propriety of her return. And Henry's brief reference to Dartmoor had suggested continuance rather than return.
But her fear remained with her. It made her forget all about George Tanqueray.
It was the sudden striking of ten o'clock that recalled to her her certainty that he would come. And he was there in the doorway before her mind had time to adjust itself to his appearance.
She fell on him with Hugh's illness as if it were a weapon and she would have slain him with it.
He stood back and denied the fact she hurled at him. As evidence supporting his denial, he produced his recent correspondence with the editor. He had heard from him that morning, and he was all right then. Jinny was being "had," he said.
He had not come there to talk about Brodrick, or to think about him. He was not going to let Jinny think about him either.
He had come early because he wanted to find her with all the dreams of the night about her, before her passion (he was sure of it) could be overtaken by the mood of the cool morning.
Jinny had begun to pack her manuscript (she had forgotten it till now) in the leather case it travelled in. She had a hat with a long veil on. Tanqueray's gaze took in all this and other more unmistakable signs of her departure.
"What do you think you're doing?" he said.
"I'm going back."
"Why?"
"Haven't I told you?"
Positively he had forgotten Brodrick.
He began all over again and continued, tenderly, patiently, with all his cold, ascendant, dispassionate lucidity, till he had convinced her that her fear was folly.
She was grateful to him for that.
"All the same," she said, "I'm going. I wasn't going to stay here in any case."
"You were going?"
"Yes."
"And do you suppose I'm going to let you go? After last night?"
"After—last—night—Imustgo. And I must go back."
"No. Remember what you said to me last night. We know ourselves and we know each other now as God knows us. We're not afraid of ourselves or of each other any more."
"No," she said. "I am not afraid."
"Well—you've had the courage to get so far, why haven't you the courage to go on?"
"You think I'm a coward still?"
"A coward." He paused. "I beg your pardon. I forgot that you had the courage to go back."
Her face hardened as they looked at each other.
"I believe after all," he said, "you're a cold little devil. You stand there staring at me and you don't care a damn."
"As far as damns go, it was you, if you remember, that didn't care."
"Are you always going to bring that up against me? I suppose you'll remind me next that you're a married woman and the mother of two children."
"We do seem rather to have forgotten it," she said.
"Jinny—thatought never to have happened. You should have left that to the other women."
"Why, George, that's what you said six years ago, if you remember."
"Youare——"
"Yes, I know I am. You've just said so."
"My God. I don't care what you are."
He came to her and stood by her, with his face close to her, not touching hers, but very close. His eyes searched her. She stood rigid in her supernatural self-possession.
"Jinny, you knew. You knew all the time I cared."
"I thought I knew. I did know you cared in a way. But not in this way. This—this is different."
She was trying to tell him that hitherto his passion had been to her such a fiery intellectual thing that it had saved her—as by fire.
"It isn't different," he said gravely. "Jinny—if I only wanted you for myself—but that doesn't count as much as you think it does. If you didn't suffer——"
"I'm not suffering."
"You are. Every nerve's in torture. Haven't I seen you? You're ill with it now, with the bare idea of going back. I want to take you out of all that."
"No, no. It isn't that. I want to go."
"You don't. You don't want to own that you're beaten."
"No. It's simpler than that. I don't care for you, George, not—not as you want me to."
He smiled. "How do you think I want you to?"
"Well—you know."
"I know that I care so much that it doesn't matter how you care, or whether you care or not, so long as I can put a stop to that brutality."
"There isn't any brutality. I've got everything a woman can want."
"You've got everything any other woman can want."
She closed her eyes. "I'm quite happy."